Distributed and Spike-Based Computation

Future technologies can benefit enormously if we learn to exploit the strategies and mechanisms used by nervous systems and implement them in electronic computing systems.
The advantage of nature lies in the way computation is organized: rather than using a centralized processing unit or memory, brains are made up of large numbers of simple computing elements that form a network and all operate in parallel.
These elements are inherently noisy, unreliable, and imprecise and their parameters may change over time due to fluctuations in their environment or in their physiology.
While any of these properties would be fatal for most conventional computing systems, brains seem to exploit them as resources of computation.
The purpose of this project is to investigate the impact of some of the most prominent mechanisms and strategies used by biological information processing systems on computation and to design and implement artificial computing systems based on these principles.